VMP 300: What Veterinary Marketing Really Is (And What It Isn't)

Brandon Breshears 00:00:00  I think most practice owners have a serious problem when it comes to marketing. A lot of times they think it's just advertising or they're not actually sure what marketing is. And if you've ever run ads on Facebook, or maybe you've run Google ads or you've done SEO, or maybe you've done social content or email marketing and you've sent something out, you've created something. You've done some type of activity that you think is marketing, but you end up ultimately walking away from it saying, you know what? I don't know if this actually worked. I don't know if this did anything. Then I think you're missing kind of the bigger picture when it comes to what marketing actually is, and how to approach it in a systematic way that will help you to deliver consistent results. Ultimately, that's what we're after with marketing. We want to be able to have a consistent and systematic way to attract new clients. And if you feel like marketing is kind of out of your control and it's something that you're just kind of throwing things at the wall to see.

Brandon Breshears 00:00:59  What sticks today is going to be an incredibly powerful episode for you, because we're going to break down what marketing really is and how you can approach it from a systematic way that's going to help you to create better results. And it doesn't matter if you've been marketing for decades or if you're just getting started in it. I know that today's episode is going to help you to break down the way that you think about marketing, so that you can have effective campaigns, and it doesn't matter if you're doing paid ads or if you're doing social media, or if you're doing email, you're going to be able to think about marketing in a way that will give you clarity on exactly what you should be doing, how you can get better results, and if something is working or if it isn't. I want you to think of a time that you've created campaigns. Maybe you created a Facebook boost or something like that and it got likes, but it didn't turn into clients. And you thought to yourself, why is that? What's going on here? Did it work? Did it not work? What's our ROI? That's something that I continuously hear not only from people that have tried marketing on their own, but also some of my clients too.

Brandon Breshears 00:02:01  They're like, what's the ROI of our ads? And they think that I can provide them ROI without having greater context for the actual revenue that it generated. So today, we're going to really break down on how to build marketing as a system in your practice so that you know exactly what to create, when to create it, and how to approach marketing so that you're meeting not only the goals that you have, but the expectations that you have with respect to return on investment. Because the truth is, all marketing works. It's just a matter of how well it works. I'll give you an example. You have a practice and this happens often. They'll send out like 7000 flyers, and then they'll sit and wait and hope that they get a response. The truth is, people are receiving those marketing pieces and they're probably looking at them. So it's generating some type of awareness for you, but it might not be generating the types of appointments that you're looking for. So it is working. But the definition of working depends on what the goal is.

Brandon Breshears 00:03:01  And the goal that you have needs to align with the strategy. So sending out flyers does work. It's just a matter of the volume, the offer and the intent that you have behind it. That's going to determine if it is worth your time and effort. And Flyers is a really kind of silly example in my opinion. Just because you can attract people so much more cheaply using digital strategies, but it might be a good strategy for you. It depends. There's not necessarily a cut and dry answer for every type of marketing, and also for every type of market. It's going to depend. So let's break down first what is marketing now? Seth Godin, who's my all time favorite. He was on the podcast. I really like how he defines marketing. He basically says marketing is the act of making change happen, and he typically does that through telling a story that resonates with people and then also will spread. But he really defines it as this. It's the generous act of helping somebody solve their problem.

Brandon Breshears 00:04:05  And if you think about it, that's exactly what your marketing should be doing. Trying to help the problem that your client has. And I think so often when we think about marketing is what do we want to promote? Instead, we should be thinking about what are the major problems that we're going to be solving for pet owners, because that's going to inform all aspects of your marketing. It's going to help you to create better offers. It's going to help you to get better conversion. And if you're thinking about in terms of the problem that your clients have. And really diving deep into that problem, how can you solve it to the best of your abilities and delight your clients? You're going to be so much more effective. It's not about just ads and tactics. It's about creating value. It's about earning trust and building a story that people really want to be a part of. Now, I love Seth's content, but a lot of times his concepts are very high level. So I want to give you kind of something to contrast that with.

Brandon Breshears 00:05:01  That's going to also be practical. So how can we apply this to your practice in particular? And that's why I think you should view marketing as a system. So for example let's say we have a Google presence. We're optimizing for Google and SEO. from that we need to break down the end goal of getting a new client in the door and break that into as many component pieces as possible. We'll talk about this in just a little bit from the macro conversion down to the micro conversion is what I like to call it. But we have this customer journey that we're trying to take people on so that they can go from being strangers to ultimately being clients. And the journey that you take them on is going to depend on the source that you're generating them from. So let's go back to that Google. I'm sorry. So so let's go back to that Google example. If you're optimizing for your Google business profile, you're going to need to have a really strong Google presence. You need to make sure that you're optimizing for the right keywords.

Brandon Breshears 00:06:04  you're going to need to make sure that you have a lead nurture system in place. You're going to need to make sure that you have the right reviews. What are the kinds of things that somebody, that you're trying to attract would need to see here, think and feel, and then maybe create some ads that'll also help deliver a direct call to action to those people. But what you'll end up with is a predictable and consistent system that will push people through a specific pathway so that it shows them things that they need to see. Answer questions, help them understand their before state, and that you empathize with it, that you know what their problems are, and then give them a predictable and specific outcome with a high level of certainty. So marketing essentially is the system that gets and keeps your ideal clients attention, and it helps to build trust and move them forward to take the right action. So we can break that down really into three core aspects here. The first thing that marketing needs to do is attract attention.

Brandon Breshears 00:07:09  So what is it that we're trying to really get on their radar? For once, we have the attention we need to build trust and credibility. So let's say we're trying to target senior pet owners. We need to get their attention. Then we need to understand their problems, build trust and credibility so that they think we're going to be able to actually solve it, and then move them closer to an appointment with an appropriate call to action, whether that's a call, a click, a book appointment or a show up. And all four of those things, whether we're getting a phone call, we're getting a click, we're getting somebody to appointment and then finally show up. There's going to be different things that will help to nurture them across each of those steps as well. So when we're talking about attracting and getting attention, we're going to be talking about, I think, the things that are most commonly associated with marketing. But the problem is that people mostly focus on this top step only and not the rest.

Brandon Breshears 00:08:06  And that's really where you have the low conversion rates come in. So attracting attention is just one piece. If people don't know about you and your practice, they can't actually become a client. And so these are, I think, the tactics that people employ to get attention. That's things like search engine optimization. That's things like pay per click ads. That's things like social media, social media ads, email, text messaging, direct mail, cold outbound. If you're picking up the phone and calling relationship building events, these type of attraction activities, I think are more commonly associated with marketing, but it is just the first step. And so if you don't have the remaining pieces in place, you're going to have lower conversion. So for today's today's episode, let's really deep dive into three of the major tactics that are most commonly used for marketing. With respect to veterinary hospitals. We have SEO, we have PPC, and we have social media. So SEO is search engine optimization and it's more and more becoming also generative results optimization.

Brandon Breshears 00:09:16  So meaning we want to be showing up for both searches and then also outputs within ChatGPT that we're being referred to the type of use that you want to use this type of marketing. So if you're thinking like I want more attention, we need to be filling the top of our funnel and getting our name out there more. That's really this part of marketing. So with SEO or search engine optimization that is making sure that your website is set up properly with all of the right title tags, Technical data. Your schema is set up properly. All of the types of things that are going to be technical and probably a little bit more difficult than the average person can handle. So you want to make sure that you have a really solid web development team that understands all of the technical aspects and has a strategy in place now, just like anything else, right? If you look at a type of disease on a doc, there's probably more than one strategy to go in and treat something, and it's going to depend on the age of the dog.

Brandon Breshears 00:10:12  It's going to depend on the diet, the lifestyle, and then also the budget of the pet owner as well. So it's the same thing with veterinary hospitals. You're going to want to make sure that what you're doing is aligned with the goals that you have, the strategy, the age of your practice, the number of reviews that you have, the client base that you have. All of these things are going to help inform the strategy, and that's going to be across any type of attraction, Type marketing that we're doing. And for example, a practice that's brand new is going to have a very different strategy from an established practice that's looking to fill open slots. Because you have an established client base, you have reviews, you have referrals, you have all of these different things that a new practice wouldn't have. So when it comes to SEO, there's a lot of companies out there that do websites. I think some major components that you really need to make sure again, onsite SEO has to be dialed in.

Brandon Breshears 00:11:09  Everything has to be optimized very, very well. You have to have schema set up. You have to have local citations, local citations or directories that point back to your site and give you backlink authority. And you want to have consistent name, address and phone number across all of these listings. SEO is best for long term local discovery, though it's not something that's an immediate fix that you can necessarily switch on and off. There's definitely improvements that you can make and see improvements over time, but this is a much more important long term gain strategy. So I think depending on the lifecycle of your practice, it's a good time to start. SEO right? When's the best time to plant a tree? It's yesterday. The second best time is today. So SEO is something that you need to be focused on. But please don't mix up SEO with PPC. And I think that's what a lot of practices do. I think Google is one category, but there's many categories within Google. But for example, with SEO, if somebody searches for vet near me or let's say vaccines in Grangeville, Idaho, or TP yellow in Grangeville, Idaho or something like that, it is something that you want to show up for.

Brandon Breshears 00:12:24  So you need to have a significant strategy there, but you need to have, I think people either on your team or just a lot of time and resources to invest in learning how SEO works and what best to do so for new practice. Really want to make sure that your web team is on your side. I don't do websites. I have no desire to do websites, but I've been learning a ton about SEO in the past 12 months. SEO has been my primary new skill that I've been really working and learning on, because I think it has so much impact for my PPC clients that I'm helping with paid ads. And so I actually created a checklist of questions to ask your web development team that will help you to get a better handle on it, and give you also a very basic understanding of SEO so that you understand the types of questions you should be asking so that you can get at least insight on their strategy and what they're doing. Because I think it's really important. And unfortunately, I think there's a lot of companies that just create really templated, low quality sites that they charge quite a bit for.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:32  And so you want to at least be proactive in guiding them on the types of things that you want to be doing and what's going to give you the highest impact. So be sure to check the show notes. We will include that checklist of questions you should ask your web development team, so that you really have a good understanding of what is going into SEO. Now, the pros for SEO is that it is evergreen. It's usually high intent. It has a high social impact because people can go and look at your reviews. They're doing a lot of transactional research data with this SEO. And so it is a very high quality source. I've run campaigns for practices that had multi six figure ad spends, and we had our attribution and tracking really, really dialed in. We knew what channels were delivering the highest ROI and the two channels consistently that would drive the most clients were paid Google and then also Google My business, specifically Google My business drives more than onsite conversion from SEO from the case studies that I have.

Brandon Breshears 00:14:36  So I think that the SEO strategy needs to have a very, very heavy Google my business presence. I also think that especially with ChatGPT, ChatGPT does not have the ecosystem for generating reviews. It can go and find stuff very quickly, but I don't think that they're going to be building out review systems and sharing data between conversations of users to know who to be referring based on internal data. So they're going to have to go out and find that. Which is why I think Google Business Profile is so important. And I think it's going to continue to produce significant ROI, even with AI being more and more powerful instead of people going to AI. I'm sorry, people going to Google my business, it'll be people going to AI, AI, going to Google my business and doing research for you. The cons with SEO is that it takes time to build it out. Next we have PPC, which is pay per click ads. That's anytime you're basically doing targeting and trying to attract attention for, you know, getting potential clients either onto your site to call you to book an appointment, things like that.

Brandon Breshears 00:15:44  PPC is best for immediate visibility promotions when you're new to a market. If you need appointments, it's something that you can turn on and turn off. You can scale it up and down. You can target specific segments. You can target dental procedures, pillows, allergies, ultrasounds, echoes. You can get incredibly detailed if you want to target people looking for mast cell tumor treatments that are not like amputations, for example, you can get that detailed. This is a great strategy. And I think of this to for both brand new clients that have new practices, but also established practices that want a consistent, steady flow of high quality clients. anytime you can add promotions here that are offers that are going to be very specific to the different segments that you're trying to attract. You're going to get higher conversion rates, but the pro is that it is instant traffic that is also measurable. And you can measure tons of different things on it. With respect to the demographics of people who are engaging with the ads that you create.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:53  You can see exactly what they're searching for, their history. You can see the activity when they're on your site. So it's very measurable and calculated. But the cons is that when you stop paying, you stop receiving it. So I think that's why a combination of both SEO and PPC is a good thing. Now, if you're in a practice where you're seeing a slowdown in clients, usually you want to try and remedy that slowdown, work on SEO at the same time, and then as you get more busy, keep your PPC going with respect to like higher value You procedures. So if you're busy and your practice is completely full, you can't do more volume. There's only one way to make more revenue and hopefully have more fun too. If you're targeting the types of procedures that you love doing that are maybe higher margins, maybe you love doing dentistry. Maybe you love doing surgeries so you could target those higher end clients just specifically with PPC. And you should be able to generate really solid on our ways.

Brandon Breshears 00:17:56  The other type of attraction attention that is really popular is going to be social media organic. And this is best for spreading awareness and bringing more new people into the fold. It's also really good for engaging with existing clients and staying top of mind so that they aren't captured by a competing practice. So community presence awareness. here you can share pet stories, you can show behind the scenes. You can use trends. I think that especially with social media Now, it's not as social as it once was. It's more interest graph now. I think it's very consistently interest based. And so we need to think about rather a relationship with the clients here. We need to think more around because like people aren't on Instagram checking in to see what their animal hospital's doing. They're showing them content that is going to be based on their interests. So maybe you really want to talk about fear free as a bucket that you target. Maybe you want to talk about nutrition. Maybe you want to talk about preventative. Why labs are so important, the types of things and stories that you can highlight there.

Brandon Breshears 00:19:07  But social media organic is a very, very, in my opinion, difficult skill to to learn about just because you have to be really dialed into interest graph and taking trends that are going to then have overlap with the offers that you have. One of the best people who's incredible at this that I really suggest you follow is Ariel Potter. She's amazing. We have two episodes on this podcast about social, and the insights that I got from her were fantastic. The the benefit here with Social Organic is that you do have the social proof elements. You can see people and clients commenting and engaging and get social proof is like one of the best ways to generate new clients. it builds goodwill. It makes you relatable. It helps your clients to know, like, and trust you before they show up. But the con here is that it's typically hard to scale unless you have systems in place here, and it's hard to also generate reach without ads. Gary Vaynerchuk newest book called The Attention Economy or De Trading Attention, rather talks about using organic social as a testing ground and then when something works, using that as paid ads.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:29  So your creative is the targeting. And I think that that's probably the smartest and most scalable way to attract new clients using social. So we're constantly testing new things, seeing what's working, reviewing and then pushing out into ads. And and that's a consistent and measurable way. And I don't think that that's going to go away at all because of the way that interest graph is working. There's always going to be attention on social. And so making sure that you can capture the right attention through trial and error. There's really not much cost there in terms of like actual cost tested on social. If it works, push it to ads and then keep using the winners that you get. It's a pretty simple strategy that works really, really well. So once we have the attention, though, and mapping the right categories of attention based on our end goals. So SEO is long term transactional. PPC is short term transactional, and organic is a, I would say, short term and long term because it's going to take a lot of work to get good at.

Brandon Breshears 00:21:31  But, that can generate short term attention that you can then scale for a longer term with paid ads. we need to then figure out how do we take people to the next step, because attracting attention, we're only going to get a small percentage of the people who say, like, okay, my dog is sick right now. I have a burning problem that if I don't solve this problem, it's going to be bad, right? So that's only a small segment of the population that's going to be engaging with your ads in content. Let's say 20% 8020 is is a good rule there, but 20% is going to convert. We still have the other 80%. That's not. So. Now we need to turn that attention into the belief that you and your practice is the right choice. And so the goal here with trust building is credibility and emotional connection. The tactics and things that we do to build emotional connection are reviews and reputation management, email and text messaging, nurturing and then content marketing. The ads and landing pages and digital assets that you create here are also going to really want to connect with the problem that these people have, and we're going to want to help to solve that and basically move into conversion.

Brandon Breshears 00:22:50  So let's talk about reviews and reputation management. I think reviews are probably the most underused marketing tool in Vet med. I know that they're talked about a lot, but do you have a goal for the number of reviews that you're hoping to generate per month? I think every single practice needs to have a goal in mind. When I look at the practices and practice groups that are doing the best in marketing, that's I'm thinking like I, I fanboy over veggies marketing just because they'll set up a practice in a new market, and then within a month they'll have like 200 reviews. So they have this system dialed in because they know how important it is. And I would, if anybody is listening that works at veg for the marketing, I would love to have it on the podcast. because I have so many questions for you. But reviews are really ingrained into our society and they're not going anywhere. Amazon really changed the game when it came to reviews, seeing what products were rated, being able to get third party objective insight into whether this service is right for me and my pet.

Brandon Breshears 00:24:00  That's really what people are after. Not only is this a good service, but is it right for me? And so going through and seeing those reviews, it helps to quickly provide that social proof. Because we're social animals, we want to go with the group. But if we see other people like this and provide context around the types of things that they care and value that your practice is doing. It helps make the conversion process so much more easy, because they don't feel like they're being sold and convinced by you. They feel like they're making a decision that is safe and is going to get them the result that they want, but it's also social proof. Like reviews helps to build that credibility without you having to go and sell. And so anytime you get a review, it's like having a salesperson out there that's promoting your business. I would say an average practice, like if I owned a practice, I would be shooting for five reviews a week, and that would be, I don't know, too many practices that are doing that, but I think it's doable.

Brandon Breshears 00:25:00  Your team has to be on board, and I would try to incentivize them to get as many positive reviews as possible. There's a bunch of softwares out there that do it. Things like check Vet, which is a great system that helps to automatically build reviews, but you need to have a review system that is consistently sending out to every single person, and then get creative with it for, you know, building out benefits to get reviews. So, what I mean by that is if the team hits a certain number of reviews, then you have this reward. if you can provide extra steps of personalized care, ask for the reviews in the more in-depth follow up. But not only do reviews provide that social proof, it also gives signals to both AI, the search channels that this business is credible and growing. Now, with SEO in particular for Google Business Profile, it's not just the total number of reviews, but it's also the velocity of reviews that you have. So if you're consistently getting like 4 or 5 reviews per week, you're going to rank much better than somebody who had 400 reviews once, you know, a year ago.

Brandon Breshears 00:26:14  So pet owners are going to ultimately trust reviews almost as much as personal friends. The drawback from trying to get reviews is that it takes consistency, and also when you get negative reviews, they sting. And I understand that my podcast has two one star reviews on it and I'm like, what the heck? People don't like this free content. Like, that's fine, but you don't have to leave a negative review. I get it. It hurts. And by the way, as a if you enjoy this podcast, could you please leave your review? Leave me a review either on Spotify, iTunes or Google Play wherever you get your podcast from. I would really appreciate it. And if you want to leave me one star review, shoot me an email instead and say, hey, your podcast sucks. Here's what I think you can do to improve it, and I'll absolutely respond back, by the way. So I appreciate feedback for sure. But I think that's the other thing too, is that any negative reviews, even if they're ridiculous, it's the perspective of that client.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:12  And so I think you need to definitely take a look at it. Try not to take it too much to heart, but every time you get negative feedback it's a chance to grow and learn. So just remember that if somebody takes the time and effort to put a one star review and write something out, don't just dismiss it, but actually look at it and say, how can we grow? the next thing on building trust is email and text message nurturing sequences. And this is something that practices are not doing very well at best. Most practices will send out a monthly email, and that is so infrequent that it doesn't feel like you can actually build a connection. What we are trying to do here with nurturing and building trust through email content is building authority and really staying top of mind, because people just will get too busy to remember that they need to do things. Time flies. this happens all the time where you get so busy, you forget that it's been six months since you've been to the dentist, or it's been a year since you've been to the dentist.

Brandon Breshears 00:28:18  You need to get in there for a cleaning. Life is going faster than ever. People have shorter attention spans than ever, and so staying top of mind and providing topical value is going to be very, very important. The beauty of email marketing and AI tools is it's easier than ever to create highly niche, high quality content. Whether you're building out a puppy care guide or a senior pet guide, you can build up series in many courses that are delivered by email. and then when somebody signs up, they get a steady stream of content and value. I think that if the goal was that we're going to send out an email newsletter to puppy owners, and it's going to be the best puppy owner newsletter by the end of them getting this series when their pet is one year old. Ultimately, they're going to be in the top 1% of most educated pet owners, and the content that you deliver is going to give them so much value that they're going to feel confident their pets are going to have a better life, and they're really going to be set up for a happy life with their pet.

Brandon Breshears 00:29:25  Like, if that was the goal, people that were reading that would walk away feeling like they were lucky to have opted into it. I think that should be the goal. It shouldn't be. Well, we have to send out an email this week. What should we do? It's how can we best serve these group of pet owners with information that's timely, valuable and relevant and then use that? But having that approach to that follow up is much, much better than just saying, okay, we need to send out our monthly email, which we do. So always lead with value here. And if you're leading with value and providing value, you're not going to feel like you're bothering them. Because the truth is when. When you buy something new or you're researching something, usually you do a deep dive and you go down these different rabbit holes of information so that you can hopefully come up with confidence when it comes to knowing what to do. And so thinking about that, you're talking to your pet owners all the time.

Brandon Breshears 00:30:25  What are the things that they really want to know? You have so much info and and context for these relationships. You need to be talking to your clients, thinking about this, and helping to provide value here. The cons of email and text message is that it has a time that you need to spend on it, but if you set it up right, it is a system that you can set up once and build, and then it will continue to work for you. So as you start building these different systems, it's going to compound and provide more value. You're going to have different funnels for each of the different things that you build out. And if you build it out once on the right platform, you only need to do it once. We're definitely going to be doing a deep dive of funnel building, and that's going to include, emails and checklists and everything that you're going to need to know in building these different funnels. But start thinking about this. Start really, really thinking, how can we deliver more value to these pet owners so that when they think of, I'm getting a new puppy, what do I need to know? They'll think of you and your practice rather than going to YouTube.

Brandon Breshears 00:31:34  We want to try to build authority here and connection and provide wisdom and context, because that's ultimately what people are after. And especially with AI, you're going to have to build that connection and community so that they rely on you before they rely on AI. The third tactic for building trust that we're going to talk about here is content marketing. So that's things like blogs, podcasts, videos. It's best for educating And positioning you as the expert in whatever you want to be known for. So let's talk about like the top five things you need to worry about to keep your pet healthy through winter in Idaho. Like, you know, things that are going to help to build trust and connection, but really builds long term authority. It helps you with SEO. So in this type of content marketing, there's not just the benefit of staying in front of people and providing timely and relevant information, but you're also building up your SEO. you're helping to provide more context for the types of services that you offer, help educate people things that they don't know that they shouldn't and that they should be worrying about.

Brandon Breshears 00:32:50  Right. Because a lot of your clients simply just don't know what they don't know. And so if you think of these top things that your clients don't know, that they don't know, but should know, you can help to build that authority with content. In particular, I think building out a long form content strategy is probably I think it's incredibly valuable just because the longer term content, the longer form content has a longer lifespan. In terms of if you create a video, for example, that's like a 20 minute video about heartworm, and it just is incredibly in-depth and is like a pillar content resource, it takes more time to produce that, but it's going to have a lot longer of lifespan, especially if you plug that into the other systems that you're using. So including that long form piece into your email marketing and and things like that. So as often as possible, I like to start with long form content, break that down into short form pieces, and then have short form content that points back to the long form content.

Brandon Breshears 00:33:58  So Maybe building out 12 content pillars that are kind of like the the ultimate resource for your ideal clients. We always start back with the ideal clients. And last episode we talked about that. But building out these pillars that you can point back to you and use as assets for like the next five years versus, you know, maybe creating a short video that's on a trending topic on reels, that's maybe going to have a 24 hour lifespan. I think those two things are very different, and I like to typically start with the longer term content that'll help to drive people through the funnel more regularly. So the content I think most practices should think about this from the authority building and the long term, focus. The only con is that this definitely has a slower time to convert. But if you oppose that to like let's say you make a TikTok that is viral and gets, let's say, 100,000 likes on it, the lifespan of that is, you know, pretty short. And so you're going to have to come up with something new.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:12  And chances are, two, that probably is not going to generate a ton of clients in the door. And so strictly thinking like, if our goal here is to build a long term brand that drives more clients in, I think focusing on on long form content is probably the way that I would do it. and that's obviously what I'm doing with this podcast, too. I think that I'm don't necessarily want to add more to the noise of social. I don't want to keep up on the hamster wheel of social trends and things. And so I'm just trying to provide long form value and really deep context for this very specific niche. So it's actively what I'm doing. So as we have the attention piece and then we're nurturing and building connection. We're building context. We're building relationship. We then move to action. And so this is really taking the trust and goodwill that you've done, and helping to guide people into the outcome that you think is going to be best for them. At this point, we're hopefully not convincing.

Brandon Breshears 00:36:15  There's a difference between persuading and convincing, and convincing is when you feel buyer's remorse. We don't want to be doing things that are going to be manipulative or over salesy here, because that's going to end up with bad reviews and clients that you ultimately don't like working with. And so persuasion is the act of helping people come to the conclusion that you think is going to be best for them. And it's usually easiest to persuade somebody who already believes what you believe, rather than trying to change their whole belief system. I'll give you an example. Let's say that you have a pet owner that thinks that all dog food is poison, that they don't want to do vaccines for their pet, that they only feed raw beef bones. Right. And you're like, hey, we have these great prescription dog foods. We suggest these vaccine schedules. We suggest these preventative. Here's all the things that we suggest taking somebody who's on that other extreme of belief and then changing their strongly held belief system to something that you believe.

Brandon Breshears 00:37:17  It's probably pretty difficult. So the attention that we're attracting, the trust that we're building, it needs to help to explain what you believe and why you believe, so that you can try to find and align with people who already believe what you believe and want what you have. And that's ultimately what we're after here, is trying to attract the right types of people, not everybody. And it's okay not to be for everybody. You want to be for your specific client avatar, but convert those trust that trust and that goodwill into appointments and and calls and bookings. The goal here at Moving to Action is building those tangible business results, and that's where your ROI is going to be generated. And so back to the very beginning here when I talked about we have clients that are running ads. They are running ads. We are getting phone calls. We can see that they're getting more appointments. But when they ask me what's my ROI? We don't have a PIM system that can then integrate our revenue data back into our ads reporting.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:24  And so if we want to have a return on investment figured out, we have to match the customer with some point of contact that's generated from the ads so that we can then ultimately get to what is the return on investment. Now we're able to capture phone numbers, phone conversations, and really get detailed information, but it takes time and work and systems to be able to export your PIMs data. Match it to the call list that we have and then see what revenue was generated from those things. And so if you don't have a way to pull data out of your practice software and see how much revenue you generated from the people that were generated from your ads, you're not going to be able to find out what your ROI is. I hope that that makes sense. The return on investment. We need to know what that return was so that we can figure out what the return on investment is. So here at Moving People to Action, there's a few things that I think really help to make your conversion process more efficient and more effective.

Brandon Breshears 00:39:38  Number one, you need to have optimized website conversion actions here. So online booking is great. Now, a word of warning for online bookings. I see that no show rates across the board are lower, with new clients booking from cold traffic sources. So you need to make sure the 100% that you have a really solid connection system in place. So if somebody books online, they probably need to receive at least one, but probably two calls I think would be better one for confirmation, one for reminder, and then have automated text messages and emails go out to remind people, set expectations, prep them, and build connection beforehand. So it's pretty low stakes for a client to sign up for an appointment and do a no show that they don't really lose anything by doing that. So we need to increase the perceived value of that appointment when it comes to conversion. Their, phone calls are still Fantastic. Texting is fantastic, chatbots are fantastic, but we need to make it as easy as possible for people to convert and then also communicate with them in the way that they want to be communicated with.

Brandon Breshears 00:41:00  If people call, they're typically okay with calling. Some people like texting better, some people like email. I don't know who these people are, but they probably exist out there. I'm just kidding. I don't like email. Okay, so, it is important, though, to communicate with people in the way that they enjoy communication. And, the book, The Five Love languages or whatever it is, the four love languages, right? However, people like to be communicated with is their love language. And Doctor Stacy Santee, I had her on. She talked about our client communication, love languages, and that really got me thinking about this concept of communicating with people in the way that they feel heard and they appreciate communicating. Maybe that's email, maybe that's text, but make sure that that post follow up communication is in place. Have clear calls to action, clear expectations, and make sure that you're able to convert and meet people where they are. If you're in a market like where I live in Grangeville, Idaho, most of the businesses around here don't even have a website.

Brandon Breshears 00:42:06  So it's all phone calls. And so that is something that if you had a website that was great, the older people that live out there might not know how to book appointments online like that still exists in the world. So if you're in a market like Denver or Austin or Boston or Miami, people want convenience, they want speed, and they use DoorDash every day. They're buying like, everything online on their phones. So making it easy for them is really, really helpful. So having conversion actions that are optimized on your site that are measurable, Trackable and give you insight into ROI that is very, very important. Next, we have offer and promotions and offers and promotions help to improve the conversion rate on traffic. So I think offers should do a few things. You should drive urgency. You should add scarcity. You should add. basically we're trying to incentivize people to get something in return for something else. That's really what offers are trying to do. So if we're trying to get people in for dentals, maybe we do, $50 off your visit for dental procedures.

Brandon Breshears 00:43:24  What this is going to do is help to create spike in demand, reduce our cost per conversion, and drive more of those appointments in. The only con for offers is that it can train clients to wait for specials. It can train clients to expect discounts, and that's why I think it's very important to frame offers in terms of an exchange. Right. If you do this, you get this result. So we need to think of it like the same way that you train and reward like pets when you're training them. For example, if they sit, they get this reward, right. And you train people that this type of action creates this type of a result. And so you can offer things that are not just monetary discount. You can do value adds, you can do, increased convenience. You can do increased guarantees. There's lots of creative ways to make offers and promotions, not just about price, but price is the easiest way to convey value because money is how people measure value typically. And the more expensive something is, the more valuable.

Brandon Breshears 00:44:30  Theoretically it is. The less expensive something is, the cheaper it is theoretically. So make sure that the offers and promotions that you're using to move people to action. Have logic behind them. If you do give a discount, say it's because of this, give a reason for it. Don't just offer it blindly, but train clients to use the types of offers that you want them to and reward behavior rather than just discount services. And I think that's probably how you need to think about offers and promotions. The next thing for moving people to action, and this ones I think very underused, is follow up, follow up automation and then outbound to existing clients. So this is really helpful for recovering missed calls. If anybody calls in and hangs up and this happens so frequently people abandoned calls. You got to call them back. And I, I can see with insight into the clients that have like weave or call rail setup that the clients who are good at calling back. And one in particular is Doctor Blumberg, who's a client.

Brandon Breshears 00:45:36  He is amazing at making sure that anybody who calls in. If the call is missed, they call back. And he is fantastic at converting these calls. So, if it's something that you should be doing, you're going to pick up so many more appointments. If you simply pick up the phone and call the missed calls. The other thing that you should be doing, I think regularly, is doing win back sequences, whether that's emails or text messages to people who have been into the practice, giving them a compelling offer to come back in the practice and making it justified by past behavior or past action. And this is something that I'm actually working on right now, is building out a win back email sequence that you send out to clients who haven't been in practice for 12 months and giving them incentive to come back. But with how many missed calls practices have? I think that even if you converted one out of ten of those calls, you'd probably have an extra 5 or 6 clients per month that you're missing out on, and that's without spending another dollar just a little bit more time and effort and establishing systems that make sure that nobody is missed.

Brandon Breshears 00:46:43  It helps to save lost opportunities, and then it's going to make all of your marketing more effective and more efficient. The con is that it needs to be monitored and you have to actively work on this. So let's put this all together. Right now we have this framework for marketing, and it really breaks down into a tension building trust and then moving to action. So every tactic that you're going to consider, whether it's SEO, PPC, email, social media, this should be mapped to the stage that it supports and your end goals. And if you don't know the role, like if you're creating a poster and ad and you're not sure what the end goal here is, it is going to probably be a failure unless you're wildly lucky. The problem, too, is that if you're lucky, you're probably not going to be able to duplicate those results. So we want to go in with a end goal in mind. We have a hypothesis around that. So for example we want to generate for new clients today.

Brandon Breshears 00:47:43  What would be the best way to do that okay. We're already posting on social. Let's create an offer on social that says, you know, last minute vaccine slots open. Today we're offering last minute vaccines only for the cost of an exam. Well, right. So you're just generating exams and getting people in the door, something like that. doing timely offers like that, that might be what you want to do, but you're testing a hypothesis. If we do this, this should be the outcome. And then through that testing of the hypothesis, you can also track the results. Did it work? Yes. No. Maybe it worked, but not to the extent that we're hoping and then make adjustments from there. But taking insights and learning from not only your wins, but also your losses helps you to become a better marketer over time. One of my marketing mentors names was Ryan Dice. he owned digital marketing comm. He sold it and hasn't been doing as much in there, but he was really pivotal, pivotal in the early marketing lessons that I learned.

Brandon Breshears 00:48:41  and through masterminds and things that I was in that he was leading and he always said to think of marketing like dating. First they noticed you across the room. That's the attraction. Then they're going to learn that you're trustworthy, fun, engaging, and interesting. That's trust. Finally, they say yes to going out to a date. That's the action. But if you propose marriage on the first date. So, for example, running an ad with a call to action on social that is for like TP yellow, you're not going to say yes to that. They don't know you, they don't like you, they don't trust you. They're not going to say yes. So don't think to yourself that we're just going to go out and make a bunch of proposals without knowing, liking and getting the trust of your practice to your clients. Next week, we're going to be talking about the difference between marketing and sales. We're going to talk about why marketing is not sales, and we're going to talk about what to do to make sure that you're converting as much of your marketing as possible.

Brandon Breshears 00:49:48  So that's going to be a fantastic episode. Be sure to be subscribed. If you found value in this episode, I would really appreciate it if you left the review, and if you could share it with somebody who you think would be benefited from it, I would appreciate it. Have a great day! If you need help with anything, send me a message on socials or on my email. Just reach out and say hi. I always love hearing from listeners. Have a great day!